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“The Expected Loss To Society Because Of Catastrophic Climate Change Is So Large That It Cannot Be Reliably Estimated”

July 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The world is richer and smarter and healthier than ever, which is great, except that many of the forces that enabled these wonderful advances may also bring about the end of the species or at least cause an unprecedented die-off and severely diminish life for the “lucky” survivors. That’s the catch. 

In an Economist essay, Christoph Rheinberger and Nicolas Treich write of the ineffectiveness of traditional tools in assessing the cost of a potential climate-change disaster, which hampers attempts to mitigate risks, the unimaginable being incalculable. An excerpt:

Interestingly, the Pope’s letter recognises that “decisions must be made based on a comparison of the risks and benefits foreseen for the various possible alternatives”.

However, estimating these benefits means that we need to determine the value of a reduction in preventing a possible future catastrophic risk. This is a thorny task. Martin Weitzman, an economist at Harvard University, argues that the expected loss to society because of catastrophic climate change is so large that it cannot be reliably estimated. A cost-benefit analysis—economists’ standard tool for assessing policies—cannot be applied here as reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable. Other economists, including Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University and William Nordhaus of Yale University, have examined the technical limits of Mr Weitzman’s argument. As the interpretation of infinity in economic climate models is essentially a debate about how to deal with the threat of extinction, Mr Weitzman’s argument depends heavily on a judgement about the value of life.

Economists estimate this value based on people’s personal choices: we purchase bicycle helmets, pay more for a safer car, and receive compensation for risky occupations. The observed trade-offs between safety and money tell us about society’s willingness to pay for a reduction in mortality risk. Hundreds of studies indicate that people in developed countries are collectively willing to pay a few million dollars to avoid an additional statistical death. For example, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recommends using a value of around $8m per fatality avoided. Similar values are used to evaluate vaccination programmes and prevention of traffic accidents or airborne diseases.

Mr Posner multiplies the value of life by an estimate of Earth’s future population and obtains an illustrative figure of $336m billion as the cost of human extinction. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, argues that this approach ignores the value of life of unborn generations and that the tentative figure should be much larger—perhaps infinitely so.•

 

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“Being Wrong Has Long Been A Special Curse Of Economists”

July 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even many economists who’ve made their bones doing macro often encourage the next generation to do micro (while continuing to do macro themselves), but something tells me the attraction of being a “big-picture thinker,” no matter how fraught that is, won’t simply dissolve. 

In his Foreign Policy piece, “Requiem for the Macrosaurus,” David Rothkopf argues the opposite, believing that macroeconomics is entering into obsolescence, that the sweep of history can’t be framed in blunt terms as it’s occurring. He feels now is the moment to move beyond this “medieval” state, with real-time Big Data leading the way. Rothkopf’s contention would certainly explain why traditional measurements seem inept at understanding the new normal of the Digital Age–why nobody knows what’s happening. An excerpt:

Being wrong has long been a special curse of economists. You might not think this would be the case in a so-called “science.” But, of course, all sciences struggle in those early years before scientists have enough data to support theories that can reflect and predict what actually happens in nature. Scientists from Galileo to Einstein have offered great discoveries but, due to the limits of their age, have labored under gross misconceptions. And in economics we are hardly in the era of Galileo quite yet. It is more like we are somewhere in the Middle Ages, where, based on some careful observation of the universe and a really inadequate view of the scope and nature of that universe, we have produced proto-science—also known today as crackpottery. (See long-standing views that the Earth was the center of the solar system or the belief that bleeding patients would cure them by ridding them of their “bad humors.”)

Modern economic approaches, theories, and techniques, the ones that policymakers fret over and to which newspapers devote barrels of ink, will someday be seen as similarly primitive. For example, economic policymakers regularly use gross estimates of national and international economic performances—largely aggregated measures based on data and models that are somewhere between profoundly flawed and crazy wrong—to assess society’s economic health, before determining whether to bleed the economic body politic by reducing the money supply or to warm it up by pumping new money into its system. Between these steps and regulating just how much the government spends and takes in taxes, we have just run through most of the commonly utilized and discussed economic policy tools—the big blunt instruments of macroeconomics.

I remember that when I was in government, those of us who dealt with trade policy or commercial issues were seen as pipsqueaks in the economic scheme of things by all the macrosauruses beneath whose feet the earth trembled, whose pronouncements echoed within the canyons of financial capitals, and who felt everything we and anyone else did was playing at the margins.

But think of the data on which those decisions were based. GDP, as it is calculated today, has roughly the same relationship to the size of the economy as estimates of the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin do to the size of heaven. It misses vast amounts of economic activity and counts some things as value creation that aren’t at all.•

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“This Is A Far Cry From Full Autonomy”

July 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Driverless cars and trucks are the future, but when, exactly, is that? 

It would be really helpful to know, since million jobs of jobs would be lost or negatively impacted in the trucking sector in the U.S. alone. There’s also, of course, taxis, delivery workers, etc.

In the BBC piece What’s Putting the Brakes on Driverless Cars?, Matthew Wall examines the factors, legal and technical, delaying what’s assumed more and more to be inevitable. An excerpt:

The technology isn’t good enough yet

Many semi-autonomous technologies are already available in today’s cars, from emergency braking to cruise control, self parking to lane keeping. This year, Ford is also planning to introduce automatic speed limit recognition tech and Daimler is hoping to test self-driving lorries on German motorways.

But this is a far cry from full autonomy.

Andy Whydell, director at TRW, one of the largest global engineering companies specialising in driver safety equipment, says radars have a range of about 200-300m (218-328 yards) but struggle with distances greater than this.

As a result, “sensors may not have sufficient range to react fast enough at high speed when something happens ahead,” he says. “Work is going on to develop sensors that can see ahead 400m.”

Lasers and cameras are also less effective in rainy, foggy or snowy conditions, he says, which potentially makes them unreliable in much of the northern hemisphere.

Even Google has admitted that its prototype driverless car struggles to spot potholes or has yet to be tested in snow.

And how would a driverless car cope trying to exit a T-junction at rush hour if human-driven cars don’t let it out?•

 

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“I Say There Is A Big Parallel Between Bill Cosby And Bill Clinton”

July 28, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Camille Paglia is enraged, of course. 

In a really interesting Salon interview conducted by David Daley, she discusses the link she sees between Bill Cosby’s behavior and Bill Clinton’s. Well, they certainly both have a sense of privilege that’s allowed them to treat women as objects. Paglia seems convinced that this dynamic will play a role in Hillary’s Presidential campaign, but the difference between hypocrisy and lunacy is in her favor when citizens make their way into voting booths. Like most Paglia tirades, there’s a good deal of truth partially obscured by hyperbole and extravagant generalizations.

An excerpt, in which she plugs one of her books in the most arrogant of terms:

So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton–aside from their initials!  Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are!  These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile–they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power–and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.

Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, Sexual Personae–which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind!  It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life.  Everything is not black and white, for heaven’s sake!  We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead!  Cosby is actually a necrophiliac–a  style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century.

It’s hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house.  But it’s necrophilia–this fear and envy of a woman’s power.

And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother.•

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“Uber Deployed A Sophisticated, Expensive Political Campaign”

July 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Uber’s claims that it’s good for Labor are nonsense, and the press conference in Harlem even used Eric Garner’s name to sell that hokum. The rideshare company is potentially good in some ways–consumer experience, challenging the taxi business’ racial profiling, being friendlier to the environment–but it didn’t beat Mayor de Blasio because of those potentially good things, but because it outmaneuvered him on a big lie. That’s worrisome.

Chris Smith of New York smartly sums up the gamesmanship:

De Blasio hadn’t been prepared for the onslaught. What was truly disorienting for him — and politically ominous — was that the roles had been scrambled. The mayor assumed he was the progressive defender of moral fairness and the little guy: Of course city government should regulate anyone trying to add 10,000 commercial vehicles to New York’s streets. Of course he needed to protect the rights of Uber’s “driver-partners.”

Yet Uber was able to deftly outflank de Blasio on his home turf, co-opting pieces of his message, splitting him from his normal Democratic allies, and drawing together an opposition constituency that could haunt de Blasio in 2017. To do so, Uber deployed a sophisticated, expensive political campaign waged by lobbyists and strategists trained in the regimes of Obama, Cuomo, and Bloomberg. That campaign worked in part because even though Uber the company is motivated by the pursuit of profit, not social justice, Uber the product has some genuinely progressive effects. So Uber went straight at the mayor’s minority base, drawing it into its vision of the modern New York. The company’s ad blitz highlighted how Uber’s drivers are mostly black and brown. It held a press conference at Sylvia’s, in Harlem, where the company basically accused the mayor of discriminating against minorities by daring to try to rein in its growth. It pushed data to reporters showing that Uber serves outer-borough neighborhoods that for years were shunned by yellow cabs.

In doing so, the company was able to dispel its aura of Bloomberg-era elitism. Newer services like UberPool, which allows drivers to pick up multiple passengers who split the fare, would ease congestion and make the city greener. Uber exploited its appeal to a youthful, techie, multiracial liberalism, selling itself as about openness and choice — a choice that was being stymied by old bureaucratic ways that have no business in the new city. This was a direct hit on de Blasio’s greatest vulnerability: the mayor’s seeming defense of an entrenched and hated yellow-taxi monopoly that’s been one of his most prolific campaign contributors.•

 

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“The Stakes Are High”

July 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Well, of course we shouldn’t engage in autonomous warfare, but what’s obvious now might not always seem so clear. What’s perfectly sensible today might seem painfully naive tomorrow.

I think humans create tools to use them, eventually. When electricity (or some other power source) is coursing through those objects, the tools almost become demanding of our attention. If you had asked the typical person 50 years ago–20 years ago?–whether they would be accepting of a surveillance state, the answer would have been a resounding “no.” But here we are. It just creeped up on us. How creepy.

I still, however, am glad that Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and a thousand others engaged in science and technology have petitioned for a ban on AI warfare. It can’t hurt.

From Samuel Gibbs at the Guardian:

The letter states: “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

The authors argue that AI can be used to make the battlefield a safer place for military personnel, but that offensive weapons that operate on their own would lower the threshold of going to battle and result in greater loss of human life.

Should one military power start developing systems capable of selecting targets and operating autonomously without direct human control, it would start an arms race similar to the one for the atom bomb, the authors argue. Unlike nuclear weapons, however, AI requires no specific hard-to-create materials and will be difficult to monitor.•

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“Why Are Robotics Critical?”

July 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

nasamoon9

A NASA-commissioned study suggests the costs of establishing and maintaining a moon colony could be reduced by 90% if it’s a multinational, public-private enterprise that utilizes robotics and reusable rockets, and if the moon’s resources are mined for fuel and other necessities. As Popular Science points out, the whole project pretty much rests on there being abundant hydrogen in the moon’s crust, or it’s a no-go.

Below is the study’s passage on robotics, how autonomous machines would aid in the mission and what residual benefits their development may deliver to Earth:

Establish Crew Outpost

Following completion of the ISRU production facility, and the arrival of the large reusable lunar lander, the site is ready for the delivery of habitats, and other infrastructure needed for the permanent crewed lunar base. The ELA is designed to launch a Bigelow BA-330 expandable habitat sized system via either a Falcon Heavy or Vulcan LV to LEO, which is then transferred from LEO to low-lunar orbit (LLO) by leveraging inspace propellant transfer in LEO. The large reusable lunar lander will then rendezvous with the habitat, and other large modules, in LLO and transport them to the surface of the Moon. These modules would be moved by robotic systems from the designated landing areas to the crew habitation area selected during the scouting/prospecting operation. The modules could be positioned into lava tubes, which provide ready-made, natural protection against radiation and thermal extremes, if discovered at lunar production site. Otherwise, the robotic systems will move regolith over the modules for protection. Additionally, the robotic systems will connect the modules to the communications and power plant at the site.

Human & Robot Interaction as a System:

Why are robotics critical?

The reasons that the process begins with robotics instead of beginning with ‘human-based’ operations like Apollo includes:

1. Robotics offer much lower costs and risk than human operations, where they effective, which is amplified in remote and hostile environments.

2. Robotic capabilities are rapidly advancing to a point where robotic assets can satisfactorily prospect for resources and also for set up and prepare initial infrastructure prior to human-arrival.

3. Robotics can be operated over a long period of time in performing the prospecting and buildup phases without being constrained by human consumables on the surface (food, water, air, CO2 scrubbing, etc.).

4. Robotics can not only be used to establish initial infrastructure prior to crew arrival, preparing the way for subsequent human operations, but to also repair and maintain infrastructure, and operate equipment after humans arrive.

Why do robots need humans to effectively operate a lunar base? Why can’t robotics “do it all”? Why do we even need to involve humans in this effort?

1. Some more complex tasks are better performed jointly by humans and robotics….or by humans themselves. This is an important area of research and testing.

2. Humans operate more effectively and quicker than robotic systems, and are much more flexible. Human are able to make better informed and timely judgments and decisions than robotic operations, and can flexibly adapt to uncertainty and new situations.

3. Robotic technology has not reached a point where robots can repair and maintain themselves. The robotic systems will need to periodic as well as unscheduled maintenance and repair….provided by humans.

Public Benefits of Investments in Advanced Robotics

U.S. government investments in advanced technologies such as robotics will have tremendous impacts on American economic growth and innovation here on Earth. The investments just by DARPA in robotic technologies are having significant spill-over effects into many terrestrial applications and dual-use technologies. Examples of dual use technologies include:

a. Robotic systems performing connect /disconnect operations of umbilicals for fluid/propellant loading … could lead to automated refueling of aircraft, cars, launch vehicles, etc.

b. Robotic civil engineering: 3D printing of structures on the Moon with plumbing through industrial 3D printer robotics, could lead to similar automated construction methods here on Earth.

c. Tunnel inspections: Robotic operations for inspecting lava tunes on the Moon could lead to advanced automation in mine shafts on Earth. Advances in autonomous navigation, imagery, and operations for dangerous locations and places could save many lives here on Earth.

d. Remote and intelligent inspection of unsafe structures from natural disasters (tsunamis, radiation leakage, floods, hurricanes) could enable many more operations by autonomous robotics where it is unsafe to send humans.•

“Such Intensive Surveillance Is On The Rise”

July 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We will be measured, and often we won’t measure up.

Connected technologies will not just assess us in the aftermath, but during processes, even before they begin. Data, we’re told, can predict who’ll falter or fail or even become a felon. Like standardized testing, algorithms may aim for meritocracy, but there’s likely to be unwitting biases. 

And then, of course, is the intrusiveness. Those of us who didn’t grow up in such a scenario won’t ever get used to it, and those who do won’t know any other way.

Such processes are being experimented with in the classroom. They’re meant to improve the experience of the student, but they’re fraught with all sorts of issues.

From Helen Warrell at the Financial Times:

A week after students begin their distance learning courses at the UK’s Open University this October, a computer program will have predicted their final grade. An algorithm monitoring how much the new recruits have read of their online textbooks, and how keenly they have engaged with web learning forums, will cross-reference this information against data on each person’s socio-economic background. It will identify those likely to founder and pinpoint when they will start struggling. Throughout the course, the university will know how hard students are working by continuing to scrutinise their online reading habits and test scores.

Behind the innovation is Peter Scott, a cognitive scientist whose “knowledge media institute” on the OU’s Milton Keynes campus is reminiscent of Q’s gadget laboratory in the James Bond films. His workspace is surrounded by robotic figurines and prototypes for new learning aids. But his real enthusiasm is for the use of data to improve a student’s experience. Scott, 53, who wears a vivid purple shirt with his suit, says retailers already analyse customer information in order to tempt buyers with future deals, and argues this is no different. “At a university, we can do some of those same things — not so much to sell our students something but to help them head in the right direction.”

Made possible by the increasing digitisation of education on to tablets and smartphones, such intensive surveillance is on the rise.•

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“It Was Witty, Erudite And Ultimately Vicious”

July 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Years before Gore Vidal squared off with a lit Norman Mailer on Dick Cavett’s talk show, he and William F. Buckley tore into each other on live TV on numerous occasions in the run-up to the 1968 Presidential election, a continuing spectacle so vicious (“the only pro or crypto-Nazi here is yourself”) that it ultimately carried over into a courtroom. It was a huge sensation, a dress rehearsal of sorts for the tempestuous Fischer-Spassky televised chess matches, with two men who saw themselves as kingmakers behaving like pawns. The confrontation wasn’t just a sideshow but, sadly, prelude: political opinion becoming little more than scathing spectacle of little value or substance. 

The endless channels enabled by new technologies and the Reagan erasure of Fairness Doctrine would have delivered us into loud, partisan bickering regardless, but Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s new documentary, Best of Enemies, sees the Buckley-Vidal drama as the tipping point of our new abnormal.

The opening of Michael M. Grynbaum’s well-written NYT article about the film:

Before partisan panels, split-screen shoutfests and brash personalities became ubiquitous on cable news, there were two men who despised each other sitting side by side on a drab soundstage, debating politics in prime time during the presidential nominating conventions of 1968. There were Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.

Literary aristocrats and ideological foes, Vidal and Buckley attracted millions of viewers to what, at the time, was a highly irregular experiment: the spectacle of two brilliant minds slugging it out — once, almost literally — on live television. It was witty, erudite and ultimately vicious, an early intrusion of full-contact punditry into the staid pastures of the evening news.

What transpired would alter both men’s lives — and, as a new documentary argues, help change the course of how the American political media reports the news. Best of Enemies, which opens July 31, makes the case that their on-screen feuding opened the floodgates for today’s opinionated, conflict-driven coverage.•

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“Self-Driving Cars Are Merely The Vanguard Of An Approaching Fleet Of Equally Autonomous Devices”

July 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Jerry Kaplan’s excellent WSJ essay about ethical robots, which is adapted from his forthcoming book, Humans Need Not Apply, the author demonstrates it will be difficult to come up with consistent standards for our silicon sisters, and even if we do, machines following rules 100% of the time will not make for a perfect world. The opening:

As you try to imagine yourself cruising along in the self-driving car of the future, you may think first of the technical challenges: how an automated vehicle could deal with construction, bad weather or a deer in the headlights. But the more difficult challenges may have to do with ethics. Should your car swerve to save the life of the child who just chased his ball into the street at the risk of killing the elderly couple driving the other way? Should this calculus be different when it’s your own life that’s at risk or the lives of your loved ones?

Recent advances in artificial intelligence are enabling the creation of systems capable of independently pursuing goals in complex, real-world settings—often among and around people. Self-driving cars are merely the vanguard of an approaching fleet of equally autonomous devices. As these systems increasingly invade human domains, the need to control what they are permitted to do, and on whose behalf, will become more acute.

How will you feel the first time a driverless car zips ahead of you to take the parking spot you have been patiently waiting for? Or when a robot buys the last dozen muffins at Starbucks while a crowd of hungry patrons looks on? Should your mechanical valet be allowed to stand in line for you, or vote for you?•

 

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“It’s Giving People Jobs”

July 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m not in favor of capping Uber in NYC, since I don’t think it makes much economic sense to suppress innovation, but as I’ve said many times before, we should be honest about what ridesharing, and more broadly the Gig Economy, truly is: good for the consumer and convenience and the environment and really bad for Labor.

Not only will ridesharing obliterate taxi jobs that guarantee a minimum wage, but Travis Kalanick’s outfit has no interest in treating its drivers well or even in retaining them in the longer term and is only intent on using workers–even exploiting military vets–for publicity purposes. Yet community leaders and politicians, including New York’s Governor Cuomo, either keep buying this nonsense or are being dishonest.

From Glenn Blain in the New York Daily News:

ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo is siding with Uber in its battle with Mayor de Blasio.

In the latest eruption of bad blood between Cuomo and his one-time frenemy, the governor hailed the ride-sharing company as a job producer and scoffed at a City Council bill — backed by the mayor — that would cap Uber’s growth.

“Uber is one of these great inventions,” Cuomo said during an interview on public radio’s “The Capitol Pressroom” Wednesday.

“It is taking off like fire through dry grass and it’s offering a great service for people and it’s giving people jobs,” Cuomo said. “I don’t think government should be in the business of trying to restrict job growth.”•

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The 2 Worst Parts Of David Brooks’ Recent Op-Ed About Ta-Nehisi Coates

July 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Brooks’ recent op-ed about Ta-Nehisi Coates, the one in which he approached the critic and his skin color cautiously and with some surprise, as if he’d happened upon a strange creature in a forest, was most troubling to me for two reasons, both of which were demonstrated in the same passage.

This one:

You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage “that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”

I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?

If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.

I think you distort American history.•

  • The line “Does a white person have standing to respond?” is a galling transference of burden from people of actual oppression to people who’ve experienced none, a time-tested trick in the country, and one used repeatedly in discussions about Affirmative Action and other issues. The faux victimhood is appalling.
  • Even worse is this doozy: “I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.” Here’s a negation of history and culpability that’s jaw-dropping. Does Brooks believe the inordinate poverty, imprisonment and shorter lifespans of African-Americans stem solely from their decisions? Does he believe Native Americans, the targets of another American holocaust, have such pronounced social problems because of poor choices they made? From Jim Crow to George Zimmerman, American law and justice has often been designed to reduce former slaves and their descendants, not to keep the peace but to maintain the power. If Brooks wants to point out the Civil Rights Act as a remedy to Jim Crow, that’s fine, but you don’t get to do a victory lap for offering basic decency, and a sensible person doesn’t believe that improvement in our country, often a slow and grueling and bloody thing, doesn’t leave deep scars.•

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“It Falsely Seems Like They Are Part Of Civil Society”

July 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Julian Assange, the alleged Bill Cosby of Wikileaks, can be a preposterous blowhard, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been a useful part of the discussion about surveillance. At Spiegel, Michael Sontheimer has a new longform Q&A with Assange, in which they discuss what might be called Wikileaks 2.0, as well as the “digital colonization of the world” by Silicon Valley powerhouses, this era’s analog of America’s twentieth-century cultural exportation of Hollywood and hamburgers.

An excerpt:

Spiegel:

You met Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. Do you think he is a dangerous man?

Julian Assange:

If you ask “Does Google collect more information than the National Security Agency?” the answer is “no,” because NSA also collects information from Google. The same applies to Facebook and other Silicon Valley-based companies. They still collect a lot of information and they are using a new economic model which academics call “surveillance capitalism.” General information about individuals is worth little, but when you group together a billion individuals, it becomes strategic like an oil or gas pipeline.

Spiegel:

Secret services are perceived as potential criminals but the big IT corporations are perceived at least in an ambiguous way. Apple produces beautiful computers. Google is a useful search engine.

Julian Assange:

Until the 1980s, computers were big machines designed for the military or scientists, but then the personal computers were developed and companies had to start rebranding them as machines that were helpful for individual human beings. Organizations like Google, whose business model is “voluntary” mass surveillance, appear to be giving it away for free. Free e-mail, free search, etc. Therefore it seems that they’re not a corporation, because corporations don’t do things for free. It falsely seems like they are part of civil society.

Spiegel:

And they shape the thinking of billions of users?

Julian Assange:

They are also exporting a specific mindset of culture. You can use the old term of “cultural imperialism” or call it the “Disneylandization” of the Internet. Maybe “digital colonization” is the best terminology.

Spiegel:

What does this “colonization” look like?

Julian Assange:

These corporations establish new societal rules about what activities are permitted and what information can be transmitted. Right down to how much nipple you can show. Down to really basic matters, which are normally a function of public debate and parliaments making laws. Once something becomes sufficiently controversial, it’s banned by these organizations. Or, even if it is not so controversial, but it affects the interests that they’re close to, then it’s banned or partially banned or just not promoted.

Spiegel:

So in the long run, cultural diversity is endangered?

Julian Assange:

The long-term effect is a tendency towards conformity, because controversy is eliminated. An American mindset is being fostered and spread to the rest of the world because they find this mindset to be uncontroversial among themselves. That is literally a type of digital colonialism; non-US cultures are being colonized by a mindset of what is tolerable to the staff and investors of a few Silicon Valley companies. The cultural standard of what is a taboo and what is not becomes a US standard, where US exceptionalism is uncontroversial.•

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“An Individual Can Be Much More Independent”

July 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

If you see a guy on a bus in your neighborhood who looks like the great artist Ai Weiwei, it may be the real Ai Weiwei because thankfully he’s had his passport returned to him by the Chinese government after four years of stalling.

Below is a 2014 New York Times video, in which he delivers a techno-positivist take on art in an age of free-flowing information and super-connectedness. The transition is certainly a huge win in the big picture, though there’s something very different about community today being a virtual thing rather than a geographical one. And the logical outcome of the Internet of Things is that we’ll all ultimately be under surveillance like Ai Weiwei has been. I guess the most hopeful scenario is that if we’re all naked, nudity won’t matter anymore.

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“If He Crashes, Which He Eventually Must, They Will Find Another Champion”

July 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

There’s nothing the hideous hotelier Donald Trump has said or done that’s outside the modern Republican Party playbook. He just refuses to use soft, coded language to sell his extremism, which has been the hallmark of the GOP since the rise of Newt Gingrich. So when he disgustingly labels President Obama (“Kenyan”) or Mexicans (“rapists”) or John McCain (“captured“), he’s just boiled down the mindset of conservatives to its essence. And if you think the McCain remarks were somehow out of character for Republicans, see how John Kerry or Tammy Duckworth feel about that. 

The positive response to Trump among many registered Republicans is really no surprise. The more radical band, from Christian conservatives to the Tea Party, is weary of being used by the Karl Roves of the world to consolidate power. They’re angry and they want someone who’ll speak to that anger. The racist Birther buffoon may fall from the penthouse, but his followers–both a torch-carrying mob and the Frankenstein monster the party has created–will still be there. They can’t be controlled, and that’s the logical outcome for the GOP, which has spent decades cultivating anger over threatened privilege.

From Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

Any moment now, the most buffoonish, prejudiced, egomaniacal candidate in recent Republican history will implode. All that will be left to remind us of our brief spell of folly will be those neon signs flashing “Trump” on skyscrapers and casinos around the country. At that point, thank goodness, we can resume politics as usual.

Alas, the cognoscenti are kidding themselves. US politics will not pick up where it left off. Even if Mr Trump becomes the first recorded human to be lifted skywards in rapture — the “end of days” scenario to which some of his fans subscribe — he will leave a visible mark on the Republican party.

In a field of 16 candidates, when one polls a quarter of the vote it is the equivalent of a landslide. Mr Trump’s detractors, who form arguably one of the largest bipartisan coalitions in memory, comfort themselves that he is simply on an ego trip that will turn sour. That may be true. But they are missing the point. The legions of Republicans flocking to Mr Trump’s banner are not going anywhere. If he crashes, which he eventually must, they will find another champion.•

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10 Things That Happened Since Chuck Todd Declared The Obama Administration Was “Over”

July 22, 2015 in Politics | Permalink

chuck-todd

In the summer of 2014, Chuck Todd, who is paid to say words about politics on television, declared that he had looked at poll results and that the American people had decided that the Obama Administration was “over.” Nice try, Barack, no point going on, it’s done. Chuck Todd had decided.

The problem with focusing only on the horse race is that you end up stepping into a lot of horseshit. The President accomplished a few things since Todd’s declaration. You don’t have to agree with any of them to understand the efficacy of the office despite what the chattering classes of Washington might say.

  • Climate pact with China.
  • Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court.
  • Gay marriage legalized.
  • Passage of fast-track trade authority TPP.
  • Diplomatic relations with Cuba restored.
  • International agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
  • Eulogy delivered for the Charleston church shooting victims.
  • Commutation of more sentences for non-violent criminals as part of a broader attempt to reconfigure the country’s prison state.
  • Continued economic recovery with job creation each quarter.

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A Brief Note From 1911 About President Taft

July 21, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 28, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

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“An Insecure Internet Of Things Might Bring Dystopia”

July 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Internet of Things has potential for more good and bad than the regular Internet because it helps bring the quantification and chaos into the physical world. The largest experiment in anarchy in the history will be unloosed in the 3D world, inside our homes and cars and bodies, and sensors will, for better or worse, measure everything. That would be enough of a challenge but there’s also the specter of hackers and viruses.

A small piece from the new Economist report about IoT security concerns:

Modern cars are becoming like computers with wheels. Diabetics wear computerised insulin pumps that can instantly relay their vital signs to their doctors. Smart thermostats learn their owners’ habits, and warm and chill houses accordingly. And all are connected to the internet, to the benefit of humanity.

But the original internet brought disbenefits, too, as people used it to spread viruses, worms and malware of all sorts. Suppose, sceptics now worry, cars were taken over and crashed deliberately, diabetic patients were murdered by having their pumps disabled remotely, or people were burgled by thieves who knew, from the pattern of their energy use, when they had left their houses empty. An insecure internet of things might bring dystopia.  

Networking opportunities

All this may sound improbably apocalyptic. But hackers and security researchers have already shown it is possible.•

“Too Much Is Happening Too Fast”

July 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An uncommonly thoughtful technology entrepreneur, Vivek Wadhwa doesn’t focus solely on the benefits of disruption but its costs as well. He believes we’re headed for a jobless future and has debated the point with Marc Andreessen, who thinks such worries are so much needless hand-wringing. 

Here’s the most important distinction: If time proves Wadhwa wrong, his due diligence in the matter will not have hurt anyone. But if Andreessen is incorrect, his carefree manner will seem particularly ugly.

No one need suggest we inhibit progress, but we better have political solutions ready should entrenched technological unemployment become the new normal. Somehow we’ll have to work our way through the dissonance of a largely free-market economy meeting a highly automated one.

In a new Washington Post piece on the topic, Wadhwa considers some solutions, including the Carlos Slim idea of a three-day workweek and the oft-suggested universal basic income. The opening:

“There are more net jobs in the world today than ever before, after hundreds of years of technological innovation and hundreds of years of people predicting the death of work.  The logic on this topic is crystal clear.  Because of that, the contrary view is necessarily religious in nature, and, as we all know, there’s no point in arguing about religion.”

These are the words of tech mogul Marc Andreessen, in an e-mail exchange with me on the effect of advancing technologies on employment. Andreessen steadfastly believes that the same exponential curve that is enabling creation of an era of abundance will create new jobs faster and more broadly than before, and calls my assertions that we are heading into a jobless future a luddite fallacy.

I wish he were right, but he isn’t. And it isn’t a religious debate; it’s a matter of public policy and preparedness. With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast. It will shake up entire industries and eliminate professions. Some new jobs will surely be created, but they will be few. And we won’t be able to retrain the people who lose their jobs, because, as I said to Andreessen, you can train an Andreessen to drive a cab, but you can’t retrain a laid-off cab driver to become an Andreessen.  The jobs that will be created will require very specialized skills and higher levels of education — which most people don’t have.

I am optimistic about the future and know that technology will provide society with many benefits. I also realize that millions will face permanent unemployment.•

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“What If China Is The Last Country To Follow The Tried-And-True Path Of Industrialization?”

July 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

While it may not be good for our environment, industrialization has been good for our wallets. Transitioning from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing one allows a country to rapidly increase its wealth (and to contribute further wealth to other nations supplying the resources). In this century, China is, of course, the example writ large.

A post-Industrial economy in which manufacturing is no longer as valuable would seem to be the new reality, and a Disney economy of service and entertainment isn’t very transferable. In a Bloomberg View column, Noah Smith attempts to figure out a way forward for nations that are playing catch up in the Information Age. An excerpt:

The main engine of global growth since 2000 has been the rapid industrialization of China. By channeling the vast savings of its population into capital investment, and by rapidly absorbing technology from advanced countries, China was able to carry out the most stupendous modernization in history, moving hundreds of millions of farmers from rural areas to cities. That in turn powered the growth of resource-exporting countries such as Brazil, Russia and many developing nations that sold their oil, metals and other resources to the new workshop of the world. 

The problem is that China’s recent slowdown from 10 percent annual growth to about 7 percent is only the beginning. The recent drops in housing and stock prices are harbingers of a further economic moderation. That is inevitable, since no country can grow at a breakneck pace forever. And with the slowing of China, Brazil and Russia have been slowing as well — the heyday of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is over. 

But the really worrying question is: What if other nations can’t pick up the slack when China slows? What if China is the last country to follow the tried-and-true path of industrialization? 

There is really only one time-tested way for a country to get rich. It moves farmers to factories and imports foreign manufacturing technology. When you move surplus farmers to cities, their productivity soars — this is the so-called dual-sector model of economic development pioneered by economist W. Arthur Lewis. So far, no country has reached high levels of income by moving farmers to service jobs en masse. Which leads us to conclude that there is something unique about manufacturing.•

 

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“Driving Will Be A Networked Activity”

July 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Reid Hoffman of Linkedin published a post about what road transportation would be like if cars become driverless and communicate with one another autonomously.

There’ll certainly be benefits. If your networked car knows ahead of time that a certain roadway is blocked by weather conditions, your trip will be smoother. More important than mere convenience, of course, is that there would likely be far fewer accidents and less pollution.

The entrepreneur believes human-controlled vehicles will be restricted legally to specific areas where “antique” driving can be experienced. There’s no timeframe given for this legislation, but it seems very unlikely that it would occur anytime soon, nor does it seem particularly necessary since the nudge of high insurance rates will likely do the trick. 

Hoffman acknowledges some of the many problems that would attend such a scenario if it’s realized. In addition to non-stop surveillance by corporations and government and the potential for large-scale hacking, there’s skill fade to worry about. (I don’t think the latter concern will be precisely remedied by tooling down a virtual road via Oculus Rift, as Hoffman suggests for those pining for yesteryear.) I think the most interesting issues he conjures are advertisers paying car companies to direct traffic down a certain path to expose travelers to businesses or the best routes being conferred upon higher-paying customers. That would be the Net Neutrality argument relocated to the streets and highways.

It’s definitely worth reading. An excerpt:

Autonomous vehicles will also be able to share information with each other better than human drivers can, in both real-time situations and over time. Every car on the road will benefit from what every other car has learned. Driving will be a networked activity, with tighter feedback loops and a much greater ability to aggregate, analyze, and redistribute knowledge.

Today, as individual drivers compete for space, they often work against each other’s interests, sometimes obliviously, sometimes deliberately. In a world of networked driverless cars, driving retains the individualized flexibility that has always made automobility so attractive. But it also becomes a highly collaborative endeavor, with greater cooperation leading to greater efficiency. It’s not just steering wheels and rear-view mirrors that driverless cars render obsolete. You won’t need horns either. Or middle fingers.

Already, the car as network node is what drives apps like Waze, which uses smartphone GPS capabilities to crowd-source real-time traffic levels, road conditions, and even gas prices. But Waze still depends on humans to apprehend the information it generates. Autonomous vehicles, in contrast, will be able to generate, analyze, and act on information without human bottlenecks. And when thousands and then even millions of cars are connected in this way, new capabilities are going to emerge. The rate of innovation will accelerate – just as it did when we made the shift from standalone PCs to networked PCs.

So we as a society should be doing everything we can to reach this better future sooner rather than later, in ways that make the transition as smooth as possible. And that includes prohibiting human-driven cars in many contexts. On this particular road trip, the journey is not the reward. The destination is.•

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“It Would Be Spread Over 82,000 Square Miles, About The Size Of Kansas”

July 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Engineering rather than organic growth has driven the reordering of much of modern Chinese life, and it’s at the crux of Beijing’s ongoing radical transformation into a megacity of 130 million people. Complicating matters are the absence of property taxes and the restriction placed upon local municipalities from retaining any other type of fees they collect, so basic infrastructure and services have often been lacking or altogether absent during the capital city’s massive makeover. 

From Ian Johnson’s very interesting NYT report:

The planned megalopolis, a metropolitan area that would be about six times the size of New York’s, is meant to revamp northern China’s economy and become a laboratory for modern urban growth.

“The supercity is the vanguard of economic reform,” said Liu Gang, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin who advises local governments on regional development. “It reflects the senior leadership’s views on the need for integration, innovation and environmental protection.”

The new region will link the research facilities and creative culture of Beijing with the economic muscle of the port city of Tianjin and the hinterlands of Hebei Province, forcing areas that have never cooperated to work together. …

Jing-Jin-Ji, as the region is called (“Jing” for Beijing, “Jin” for Tianjin and “Ji,” the traditional name for Hebei Province), is meant to help the area catch up to China’s more prosperous economic belts: the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai and Nanjing in central China, and the Pearl River Delta around Guangzhou and Shenzhen in southern China.

But the new supercity is intended to be different in scope and conception. It would be spread over 82,000 square miles, about the size of Kansas, and hold a population larger than a third of the United States. And unlike metro areas that have grown up organically, Jing-Jin-Ji would be a very deliberate creation.•

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“Capitalism’s Replacement By Postcapitalism Will Be Accelerated By External Shocks”

July 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Guardian piece, Paul Mason, author of the forthcoming Postcapitalism, argues that in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, information technology is toppling capitalism in a way that a million marching Marxists never could, with the new normal unable to function by the dynamics of the old order.

I agree that a fresh system is incrementally forming–especially in regards to work and likely taxation–though it’s probably a heterogeneous one that won’t be absent free markets in the near term and perhaps the longer one as well. “Abundance” is a word used by a lot of people, including the author, in describing the future, but it may not be what they think it is. Food has been abundant for many decades and there have always been hungry, even starving, people.

Mason quotes Stewart Brand’s famous line “information wants to be free,” but let’s remember the whole quote: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away.”

At any rate, I’m with Mason in thinking we’re on the precipice of big changes wrought by the Internet and its many offshoots and can’t wait to read his book. An excerpt:

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm.•

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“Expectations Have Outrun The Reality Of The Technology”

July 17, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Very much looking forward to the forthcoming book Machines of Loving Grace, an attempt by the New York Times journalist John Markoff to make sense of our automated future. 

In an Edge.org interview, Markoff argues that Moore’s Law has flattened out, perhaps for now or maybe for the long run, a slowdown that isn’t being acknowledged by technologists. Markoff still believes we’re headed for a highly automated future, one he senses will be slower to develop than expected. Those greatly worried about technological unemployment, the writer argues, are alarmists, since he thinks technology taking jobs is a necessity, the human population likely being unable in the future to keep pace with required production. Of course, he doesn’t have to be wrong by very much for great societal upheaval to occur and political solutions to be required.

From Markoff:

We’re at that stage, where our expectations have outrun the reality of the technology.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the current physical location of Silicon Valley. The Valley has moved. About a year ago, Richard Florida did a fascinating piece of analysis where he geo-located all the current venture capital investments. Once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara. Now it’s moved fifty miles north, and the current center of Silicon Valley by current investment is at the foot of Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Living in San Francisco, you see that. Manufacturing, which is what Silicon Valley once was, has largely moved to Asia. Now it’s this marketing and design center. It’s a very different beast than it was.                                 

I’ve been thinking about Silicon Valley at a plateau, and maybe the end of the line. I just spent about three or four years reporting about robotics. I’ve been writing about it since 2004, even longer, when the first autonomous vehicle grand challenge happened. I watched the rapid acceleration in robotics. We’re at this point where over the last three or four years there’s been a growing debate in our society about the role of automation, largely forced by the falling cost of computing and sensors and the fact that there’s a new round of automation in society, particularly in American society. We’re now not only displacing blue-collar tasks, which has happened forever, but we’re replacing lawyers and doctors. We’re starting to nibble at the top of the pyramid.

I played a role in creating this new debate. The automation debate comes around in America at regular intervals. The last time it happened in America was during the 1960s and it ended prematurely because of the Vietnam War. There was this discussion and then the war swept away any discussion. Now it’s come back with a vengeance. I began writing articles about white-collar automation in 2010, 2011. 

There’s been a deluge of books such as The Rise of the Robots, The Second Machine Age, The Lights in the Tunnel, all saying that there will be no more jobs, that the automation is going to accelerate and by 2045 machines will be able to do everything that humans can do. I was at dinner with you a couple years ago and I was ranting about this to Danny Kahneman, the psychologist, particularly with respect to China, and making the argument that this new wave of manufacturing automation is coming to China. Kahneman said to me, “You just don’t get it.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “In China, the robots are going to come just in time.”•

_____________________________

 

“All Watched Over
by Machines of Loving Grace”

I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

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“We’ll All Be Drowning In This Sort Of Data”

July 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A deluge of data that assaults the senses doesn’t worry me so much. What’s more concerning is when those tubes carrying information to and from us are so quiet that you can barely hear a hum, when there are no tubes, when the system becomes seamless. It will happen, and it will seem normal.

From “We Are Data: The Future of Machine Intelligence,” Douglas Coupland’s latest Financial Times column (and one of his best):

What we’re discussing here is the creation of data pools that, until recently, have been extraordinarily difficult and expensive to gather. However, sooner rather than later, we’ll all be drowning in this sort of data. It will be collected voluntarily in large doses (using the Wonkr, Tinder or Grindr model) — or involuntarily or in passing through other kinds of data: your visit to a Seattle pot store; your donation to the SPCA; the turnstile you went through at a football match. Almost anything can be converted into data — or metadata — which can then be processed by machine intelligence. Quite accurately, you could say, data + machine intelligence = Artificial Intuition.

Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyse it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking — even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to replicate human neural networks, and connected together form even larger artificial neural networks. It sounds scary . . . and maybe it is (or maybe it isn’t). But it’s happening now. In fact, it is accelerating at an astonishing clip, and it’s the true and definite and undeniable human future.•

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